Between Paper and Pixels: Transmedial traffic in architectural drawing

NL Architects, BIM is beautiful, 2014

For its third annual conference, the Jaap Bakema Study Centre aimed to look more closely into new developments in architectural drawing, specifically the cross-pollination between the media of paper and pixels. Selected papers and special guests brought a wide variety of challenging perspectives to the conference.

Papers presented in this conference addressed some of the questions and themes were elaborated in our Call for Papers. Session 1 questioned how software and digital modeling software disrupt traditional design processes. In session 2, practitioners and educators showed their explorations in terms of protocols and practices, combinations of digital and analog that pushed the boundaries of expression and representation. In the final paper session, scholars reflected on how digital tools expand the ways we relate to, and produce, the built and social environment. The conference program and book of abstracts is available to download by clicking in the link below.

In addition, the conference hosted two special sessions. The first one was devoted to the exploration of new relations between the digital, art, and craft. Serban Bordea, speaking on behalf of visual artist Ilona Lénárd, explained the robotic painting project titled Machining Emotion, which establishes a mutual relationship between human emotions and robotic machines. TU Delft researcher Filippo Maria Doria presented his awarded Archiprix project and his related research into the perception of architecture. Architect Tony Fretton described the use he makes of digital sketching and how technology has affected his practice.

“The nature of the technical drawing has hardly changed since people began drawing, because the issues are what you draw, how do you place on a piece of paper or whatever medium you use, line weight, color, things like that they are affected by digitalization, but they are not altered by it.”

“In our office, people would take the beginnings of the idea I would talk about, and they would draw it, and their interpretation is interesting. Instead of doing the work manually, I do it in participatory way… These are drawings that I didn’t make, but that I instigated.”

Pop-up exhibition at the Between Paper and Pixels conference. Photo Victor M. Sanz

A special session with Carel Weeber and Henk Vanstappen was held around a pop-up exhibition showing examples of digital architecture from the collection of Het Nieuwe Instituut / Rijksarchief voor Architectuur en Stedenbouw. The display presented works by SAR, NNAO, Carel Weeber, OMA, Abel Cahen, Asymptote, UN Studio, MVRDV, Winka Dubbeldam, and Van den Broek en Bakema, and was curated and presented to the audience by Herry Berens and Suzanne Mulder (Het Nieuwe Instituut).

“In that time, 1967, my colleagues in Delft, the professors, didn’t allow my students to use the computer to make the drawings… Because if you made a computer drawing, it was not a drawing.”

“In no way it was possible to design complicated buildings with the first Atari computer we had in our office; you had to make simple buildings to produce them in the computer. But I always did simple buildings, so for me it was very useful to move to the computer. Although, in that time, simple buildings were not very popular in Holland”

“I don’t think that the use of the computer changed my designs, I was just not interested in complicated buildings… I like simple buildings, and, of course, I don’t like to spend too much time on them. The quicker the nicer.”

Programme Wednesday 31 November

Location: TU Delft

OPENING REMARKS

13:45-14:00

Peter Russell, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft